Mirror.ac.uk to Scale Back Operations

[]AC[dRuM]

...writes Slash.org...

Posted by michael on Saturday May 15, @05:07AM
from the no-kernels-for-you dept.
KingDaveRa writes

"It would seem that the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (www.jisc.ac.uk) have decided to withdraw funding from the www.mirror.ac.uk service. They still want to run a service, but '...perhaps on a smaller scale, and limited to the most popular mirrors. This would, however, depend upon securing sponsorship or alternative funding very quickly, and the approval of our host institutions.' This could turn out to be quite an inconvenience for the UK, as the mirror.ac.uk service has proven itself very fast and reliable."

We all know the scaling down of operations all over the net has resulted in some very strong companies / new ventures being re born at a much slower rate. The positive aspect of this is a more steady rate of growth, rather than the boom and bust of the .com bubble, the plus side is this has led to a more secure future for a lot of new firms and as such I see this news not as all doom and gloom, more just a part of a bigger picture in the internets ever evolving history, its a good thing to take stock and regroup, kind of like what FH is in the process of doing I presume?

Reality has somewhat of a sting in the tail eh. I wonder what avenues are available for sponsorship?

Interesting comments @ SD.org...

More >>>

 

[Padwah]

who or what is mirror.ac.uk? I looked at the webby but I'm still none the wiser, maybe it's just the beer?!

 

[fatbusinessman]

It's a site which provides a mirror for other FTP sites.

Hence the name

 

[Danya]

It's also really really fast.

 

[Glema]

afaik it's provided by janet - the university/college's network, and yes it does tend to be quite fast

 

[Shovel]

It's extremely fast if you're at uni - you can often get the full-on 10Mbit throughput when you download from it. Which is nice. I remember I once downloaded the Entire SuSE Linux 8.2 mirror to do a network install when the FTP hookup bit of the installer didn't work.

Scaling back and reorganising is - in fairness - probably a good thing. There will be an awful lot of rarely/never used stuff on there and they could still provide a perfectly good service by being more selective about what they mirror.

Then again, the process of having people vet what does/doesn't get mirrored and setting up the system to syncronise it is concievably more expensive than the bandwidth and storage required to just duplicate the whole FTP... hmmm.

 

[]AC[dRuM]

Then again, the process of having people vet what does/doesn't get mirrored and setting up the system to syncronise it is concievably more expensive than the bandwidth and storage required to just duplicate the whole FTP... hmmm.

good point, you should throw that out @ s.org